Category: ‘English’

The initial RUDDER model consisting of a single software block which includes all features, thus imposing a greater and greater complexity on all of our users, has reached its limits. We have now reached a sufficient understanding of the domain, its challenges, and the way RUDDER is used, to make us realize that this all-in-one […] Read more

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RUDDER aims at providing an easy to use configuration management solution. One of the key design choice that allows it is the separation of configuration according to different abstraction levels: Techniques which are configurable configuration templates Directives which are ready-to-use instances of a technique Directives are then linked to machines (using rules and groups). Techniques […] Read more

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Since RUDDER 2.7 (Almost 5 years ago!), we provide an API that gives you access to almost all data and features from RUDDER so you can build your own scripts and integration and make RUDDER more integrated in your IT environment (more details about the API here: https://www.rudder-project.org/rudder-api-doc/), there was one flaw in our design: […] Read more

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Until Rudder 4.3, there wasn’t any notion of node lifecycle in Rudder, and so no native way to differentiate between different states of a node. That used to cause some troubles, for example when nodes are no longer connected to a Rudder Server (typically for a maintenance period). So far, in such a case, the […] Read more

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Rudder directives management can be quite complex when dealing with heterogeneous nodes, needing different configurations. In order to limit the multiplication of directives we could use variables or node properties to pass different parameters and try to factorize some code. The 4.3 release comes with a new feature to expand the node inventory with arbitrary […] Read more

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Rudder 4.3 has been released on April 19th 2018 and brings a lot of much anticipated usability improvements. Main new features in Rudder 4.3: Technique Parameters: You can now add parameters to your Techniques created with the Technique editor. The value of theses parameters will be set in Directives, making your Techniques much more versatile […] Read more

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Again this year, Rudder community gathered CfgMgmtCamp, 6 and 7 Feb., Gent (Belgium). But for the first time in its history, Rudder had its own room. Indeed, even though it has been many years since Rudder is present at Cfgmgmtcamp, Rudder used to be in a shared room. Over time, Rudder’s community grew, and the […] Read more

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Rudder 4.1 has been released on March 30th 2017 and brings a lot of much anticipated convenience improvements to make the best of Rudder 4.0 big new features. This article describes the most significant ones. Feel free to read the 4.1 changelog to see the complete list. Organize Rules and Directives by setting key=value tags […] Read more

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Shortly after the release of Rudder 4.0 in November, the development team sat down together for a retrospective of the whole release cycle. We studied what went well, less well, and downright bad, and we looked at the lessons learned. Last but not least, we picked two topics to focus on improving in the next […] Read more

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Hello Rudder aficionados! TL;DR: rudder-setup setup-server 4.0 In the Rudder team, we regularly test Rudder, either for support or for automatic testing. That’s why we made rudder-tests. It calls Vagrant to install virtual machines and then installs Rudder on them. Since the installation part was really useful for everyone, we decided to make it an […] Read more

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Introduction Hello folks! Today, I’m writing this post to talk about a solution we found to the following problem: how do you export compliance data from a Rudder installation? The use case was: how do you export Rudder compliance metrics that are currently accessible in the Web UI in a machine-usable format so you can […] Read more

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Rudder 4.0 changes for good the way we see IT management Here we are! After months of hard work, nourished by years of feedback from the community and our clients, Rudder 4.0 is out. What makes this version so special we felt it deserved its own epic version instead of pursuing towards a more discreet […] Read more

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Rudder 3.2, starting from 3.2.8, offers a new package management implementation. It is new, and not as tested as the previous one, but already usable. This article explains the reason for this change, and will give an overview of the features and their usage. Why? As you may have noticed, the current package management implementation […] Read more

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Last month we discovered Electric Cloud, a Californian company specialized in Continuous Delivery. They did a great job creating a wiki gathering every tools and companies involved in IT auotmation, from infrastructure configuration management to continuous depolyment. As we praised this intiative, and not only because Rudder is included in the configuration management section, we […] Read more

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Why use mustache template When you start a configuration management project, you promptly discover that there are are two ways of managing your configuration files. You can either edit the existing ones or use templates to replace them all. Editing pros and cons: it is more complex and more bug prone it is easier when […] Read more

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Rudder 3.1 “Frigate” was released 9th July 2015. The main changes are: Improvements on security: inventories are now signed and sent over HTTPS, a basic SELinux policy is now provided New features in the API: compliance, rule and group categories, complex queries on nodes Some UI improvements: compliance of each Node in Nodes list, […] Read more

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Infrastructure automation tools like Rudder, SaltStack, Chef, Puppet or CFEngine can manage your system from top to bottom – once they are installed on it. The typical chicken and egg problem occurs when deploying such a tool – how do you bootstrap it? Each managed node needs to have an agent installed and configured on […] Read more

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Jenkins is an excellent application to automatically build/test software projects. We rely on it in Normation to build, test and package Rudder and ncf, for all the OSes and versions we support; resulting in a lot of jobs to manage (currently over 300). Part of Jenkins’ awesomeness is that it has a neat REST API, […] Read more

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Open source software is the rule in IT infrastructure automation. But what business models do companies like us apply, and how do these affect product decisions and open source users? The so called “open core” model is common, but we believe it introduces schizophrenia, as Chef just announced they do too. This post will explain […] Read more

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Last month Infoworld published an article titled “Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt” written by Paul Venezia, that prompted many people in the configuration management community to get in touch with us to ask why CFEngine was not included. Our answer was simple: “No, we have no clear reason as to why this […] Read more